Possible to purchase just a SIM card and activiate it with a Prepaid plan?

mcjoz88 · ‎06-21-2009

I am just wondering if it is possible to purchase a SIM card from AT&T's website here and activate it with a Pre-paid plan, such as the $50/month unlimited everything plan, then use it in a smartphone(purchased seperately from ebay or something), such as the Sony Xperia Sola, or the Sony Xperia Ion that is going to be released June 24th? I really would like to purchase a new smartphone with data service, but I do not want to have to be attached to a contract for 2 years, plus pay a ridiculous amount of money per month, you know?

I searched the Shop section of the website, but unless I am blind, I could not find just a SIM card to purchase. I guess I could always just buy one of those cheap Pre-paid phones, get the SIM card from that, and then purchase the phone I really want from ebay or whatever, then switch the sim card over, right?

ilikewireless · ‎07-10-2011

Welcome to the prepaid club. If you have an unlocked non-AT&T GSM phone, you can use a GoPhone SIM to activate AT&T phone service. I myself have not found a GoPhone SIM online yet. Yes, you can buy a $9.99 GoPhone (on sale price) just to use the SIM as long as you don't activate the 9.99 GoPhone, as doing so may lock the SIM to the 9.99 GoPhone. You can just activate your unlocked phone with a GoPhone SIM inside.

Unfortunately, the $50 monthly unlimited plan includes data for non-smartphones only. BUT you can get the $25 monthly plan plus the $5/50MB, or $15/200MB, or $25/1GB for smartphone data.

The easiest is to get an AT&T branded phone. If you like to get an unlocked non-AT&T phone, you will not likely get 3G as AT&T network uses AT&T specific frequencies. You will get just 2.5G (EDGE). There are only a handful of Nokia phones that have all the frequencies used by AT&T, T-Mobile and others. The Nokia N8 should give you 3G if you don't mind the Symbian OS.

By the way, with prepaid account, a 4G phone will not likely give you 4G but it should work at 3G, given the proper APN (as far as I know.) I have no experience with 4G phones but you can search the forum to see if you really want to tackle the configuration yourself.

eshclk · ‎07-18-2012

You can find AT&T sim or micro sim cards online at Amazon or ebay prices range from 0.01 to 9.99

ilikewireless · ‎07-10-2011

eshclk wrote:
You can find AT&T sim or micro sim cards online at Amazon or ebay prices range from 0.01 to 9.99

eshclk, thank you very much for the post.

French Bread Pi… · ‎07-19-2012

If you go into an actual ATT store you can purchase a SIM card for a GO Phone that you already own. I just did this recently with a GO Phone I already had been using for another purpose, it had a different SIM card in it - so it was already unlocked. I was switching it over to a new number. All I had to do was go into the ATT retail store, they give you the SIM card for free when you purchase/sign up for a GO Phone plan. I signed up for the $25 dollar monthly rate plan option -- I did not have to do the auto refill or renewel or anything like that in case anyone was wondering about that.

I paid a total of $26.25 ($25+tax) for a fresh GO phone SIM card which gave me a new cell phone number. I don't know if this is common but the lady that helped me allowed me to choose from several different phone numbers on the computer screen which was unexpected and nice of her. In addition they transfered my address book from my old SIM card onto my new SIM card. The was expecting this process to be very time consuming and difficult to be honest but it was a pleasant surprise when I was in and out of the store in less than 15 minutes with everything done to my satisfaction. Now if only every other process dealing with ATT was like that....